Commission split over proposals for GM seeds labelling

Commissioners Margot Wallström (environment) and Franz Fischler (agriculture) aim to clinch an agreement at next week’s (8 September) meeting of the EU executive on a proposal which they have jointly tabled. This would require oilseed rape and maize seeds to be labelled in cases where 0.3% or more of their DNA has been genetically modified.

The two contend that their proposal is necessary to exempt labelling in cases where small traces of GM ingredients are technically unavoidable in conventional seeds. That can occur due to ‘cross-pollination’, such as when GM properties of seeds in one planting are transferred to a GM-free planting in the vicinity by pollen or insects.

“We don’t have a self-sufficient supply of seeds in Europe,” explained one food safety official. “Small farmers in particular have to buy imported seeds, unlike big farmers who can rework their own seeds. [With the 0.3% threshold], we would have increased costs for farmers.”

This opinion was backed up by a study published earlier this year by the American Agricultural Economics Association. It calculated that a 0.3% threshold would raise costs by 35%, nearly five times as much as a 1% GM-detection level.

EuropaBio, the umbrella group for European biotechnology firms, said it would prefer the Commission to advocate the 0.5% threshold for maize which had been put on the table last year. Its spokesman Simon Barber said: “What we would like to see is a pragmatic threshold for these things. Nowhere in agriculture can you guarantee 100% purity because agriculture takes place in an open environment. If you demand 100% purity in oilseed rape, for example, you will probably find that nobody will offer it to you.”

Friends of the Earth campaigner Geert Ritsema argued that the measure could harm biodiversity. He cited field trials commissioned by the UK government, which last year found a marked drop in the number of butterflies in fields where GM oilseed rape was being grown.

He called too on the Commission to stall on adopting new GM proposals until it hands over the baton to a new executive on 1 November. Green groups are hoping that incoming Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel will prove more anti-biotechnology than most of the outgoing commissioners; in her native Denmark she has succeeded in placing a law requiring a GM seed labelling threshold of 0.1%, the lowest detectable level, on the statute books.

But Commission spokeswoman Beate Gminder said: “This Commission is fully operational and can still take decisions.”

Next week’s meeting is likely also to discuss a plan by David Byrne to have 17 varieties of GM maize, manufactured by American multinational Monsanto, authorized at EU level. Byrne’s aides see the measure as a purely technical one.

They say that because all varieties have been approved by at least one member state, it follows they should be automatically approved across the Union under a 1990 EU directive.

However, insiders say that both Wallström and Fischler have raised objections to Byrne’s initiative.